by Rosanne Bane
Play keeps entropy at bay. As long as we play, we receive all the benefits of play. But if we stop playing, we stop developing, stop healing and re-creating our bodies and brains, stop engaging with others, stop truly enjoying life.
Play Is Creative
In addition to these direct brain benefits, play promotes creativity for a variety of other reasons. When we play, we make new associations and connections, imagine alternatives, play with novelty, and see metaphors and solutions.
We experiment without expectations, and those freewheeling experiments often lead to unexpected discoveries. As Dr. Stuart Brown points out in Play, “The first steam engine was a toy. So were the first airplanes. . . . When we are not up against life or death, trial and error brings out new stuff. We want to do this stuff not because we think that paper airplanes will lead to 747s. We do it because it’s fun. And many years later, the 747 is born.”56
Brown sees the creative impulse arising from the play impulse. “If we look at a life over time, and observe the origins of many artistic expressions, they are rooted in early play behavior that gets encouraged by natural talent and richness of opportunity in the environment. Watch a two-year-old who is drawn to music spontaneously dance to the beat of a summer band concert in the park. Fifteen years later, that kid may be a consummate pianist or just spend hours humming and strumming a guitar.”57
And finally, because play is fun, it reduces stress and the limbic system takeovers triggered by stress. Anything that reduces stress has the net effect of improving our creativity.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: WHEN IS PLAY SELF-CARE AND WHEN IS PLAY PROCESS?
Experts group play into three categories: body play (active movement without time pressures or expectations), social play (interacting with others just for the fun of it) and object play (creating something with your hands with or without an anticipated end result, although if the goal is entirely economic, it’s likely the activity is work rather than play).58 Process is mostly likely to be object play or sometimes body play, although something like improvisational music or comedy that engages others could also be considered Process.
Ultimately, whether you call your play Self-care or Process is your call. Imposing rigid distinctions would only take the fun out of it.
As writers we need variety in our play: sometimes playing alone, sometimes with others, sometimes engaging in play with defined rules, sometimes engaging in play that is imaginatively free-form, sometimes moving our bodies, sometimes challenging our minds.
Instead of asking, “How much play is enough?” ask yourself, “How much play can I get away with?” Stay open to opportunities to turn any activity into play—you’ll learn better, increase the health of your brain and the rest of your body and enjoy life more. Of course, some challenges must be endured for the sake of a desired outcome no matter how difficult or painful they are, but even these are easier when you maintain a playful attitude.
CHALLENGE: START YOUR SELF-CARE HABIT
You need to find a balance of activities and practices that keep you healthy and happy. Start with one of the five forms of Self-care that you’re most interested in giving yourself. When you’re consistently honoring your commitments to that form of Self-care, add another.
I suggest you copy and complete the Self-care Commitment Form below for each of the five forms of Self-care you’re ready to commit to. (You can copy the PDF of this Self-care Commitment Form at http://BaneOfYourResistance.com/around-the-writers-block-forms/. Change the wording if necessary to make the form fit your commitments.) Just like you did for Process and Product Time, sign and date the form and ask a friend to sign and date it as your witness. Post the completed, signed and dated form in your calendar (or where you’ll see it when making other appointments) to remind you that you have standing appointments with yourself.
My Self-care commitment to sleep is (number of) __________ hours a day, (number of) __________ days a week on (list the days) __________.
My Self-care commitment to exercise is to (indicate form of exercise) __________ (number of) __________ minutes a day, (number of) __________ days a week on (list the days) __________ in the (indicate morning, afternoon or evening) __________.
My Self-care commitment to focus is to (indicate how you will focus or what you will focus on) __________ (number of) __________ minutes a day, (number of) __________ days a week on (list the days) __________ in the (indicate morning, afternoon or evening) __________.
My Self-care commitment to meditation is (number of) __________ minutes a day, (number of) __________ days a week on (list the days) __________ in the (indicate morning, afternoon or evening) __________.
My Self-care commitment to play is to (indicate form of play) __________ (number of) __________ minutes a day, (number of) __________ days a week on (list the days) __________ in the (indicate morning, afternoon or evening) __________.
Signed: __________ Date: __________
Witnessed by: __________ Date: __________
INQUIRY
“What am I doing to care for myself now? Do I treat myself as well as I treat others? If I had an extra hour a day, what could I do to become healthier, happier and more satisfied? Who else would benefit if I did that?”
SECTION 3
Putting the Habits into Practice
6
RITUALS AND ROUTINES
Success Stories
Honoré de Balzac always put on a dressing gown that looked like a monk’s robe before he wrote. Alexandre Dumas used different colors of paper and different pens for different kinds of writing; Saul Bellow had two typewriters—one for fiction, one for essays and criticism—that could never be interchanged. Charles Dickens moved the ornaments on his desk into a specific order before starting to write. Isabel Allende lights “candles for the spirits and the muses,” surrounds herself with fresh flowers and incense, and meditates to open herself to her writing. Steven Pressfield wears his lucky work boots, drapes his lucky sweatshirt nearby, and positions his lucky cannon on a thesaurus pointed at his chair so “it can fire inspiration into me.”
Few writing rituals make sense to anyone but the writer who employs them. Some are even contradictory: Stephen King writes to loud rock and roll; May Sarton preferred eighteenth-century music only. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll and Günter Grass all wrote standing up; Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton and William Styron all wrote lying down. John Cheever, Victor Hugo, John McPhee and Hope Dahle Jordan belong to what Ralph Keyes calls in The Courage to Write “the Bathrobe School”1; that is, they refrain from getting dressed until after they’ve finished the day’s writing, so it’s harder to leave the house to follow a distraction. Benjamin Disraeli, Anne Bernays and John Keats were all firm believers in the necessity of dressing professionally to write.
Despite a prevailing cultural bias against rituals as mere superstitions, writers have long known the power of ritual to reduce anxiety, increase confidence, and initiate and sustain their writing. As novelist John Edgar Wideman observed, “The variations are infinite, but each writer knows his or her version of the preparatory ritual must be exactly duplicated if writing is to begin, prosper.”2
Why Are Writers So Superstitious?
In The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes claims that writers use rituals to ease anxiety, pointing out that “ritualized behavior is common among those who do dangerous work.”3
Twyla Tharp highlights the need for rituals when we are vulnerable. In The Creative Habit, she writes, “It’s vital to establish some rituals—automatic but decisive patterns of behavior—at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.”4 According to Tharp, ritual eliminates doubt, reassures us, puts us in motion, and gives us confidence to proceed.
Robert Olen Butler claims writers need rituals the
way athletes do, to distract us from thinking too much about technique and how we do what we’re doing. In From Where You Dream, Butler observes, “If the athlete begins to send the process into his head, he goes into a slump. He misses the basket, he misses that turn. Lights out. He drops the ball. I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you’re less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it’s technique, you think about it. If it’s your socks, it’s not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that’s what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.”5
Positioning a model cannon so it can fire inspiration into you, needing to wear your bathrobe or your lucky writer’s hat, or using different-colored paper and pens for different kinds of writing are all pretty irrational. And at the same time, these rituals make perfect neurological sense.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: NEURONS THAT FIRE TOGETHER, WIRE TOGETHER
You may remember from chapter four that Hebb’s Law states, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In other words, when a group of neurons that process one movement, sensation or behavior are frequently activated at the same time that another group of neurons responsible for another movement, sensation or behavior are activated, those two groups of neurons will begin to make connections and fire simultaneously.
So if the neurons for smelling lemons are activated at the same time that the neurons you use when you’re writing are activated, those two groups of neurons start to form a connection; they “wire together.” Repetition reinforces this connection, so that eventually firing one set of neurons causes the other set to fire as well. The more you repeat the behaviors together and the more exclusive the behaviors are—you smell lemons only when writing—the more powerful the neural connection becomes. Eventually just smelling lemons will trigger the neurons used for writing and you’ll “feel” like writing.
German playwright Friedrich Schiller applied this principle long before Hebb proposed his neuroplasticity concept. Schiller kept rotten apples in a drawer to keep his imagination alert. He used the association so much, he claimed he couldn’t write without the odor. It may have had a secondary benefit of holding at bay anyone who would otherwise interrupt Herr Schiller’s genius.
WRITER’S APPLICATION: THAT REMINDS ME
Try this brain experiment—don’t worry, you don’t need a scalpel and a mirror, just a pen and a piece of paper.
Select an evocative scent, like the smell of fresh-baked bread. Remember the smell as vividly as you can. If it’s a smell you can easily access, like vanilla or cinnamon, open a bottle of the real stuff and inhale. If you can’t easily create the smell, don’t worry, your memory will be enough. For a few moments close your eyes and focus on the smell or the memory of the smell.
Then list all the words that come to mind. You’re going for quantity of words and ideas, not quality of sentences. If the smell of fresh-baked bread brings to mind all those Saturdays you spend with Aunt Martha kneading dough and baking bread, write:
Aunt Martha
Saturday mornings
Kneading
Sore shoulders
Damp towels
Flour on my hands
Butcher-block cutting board
Don’t try to write sentences and paragraphs. Keep your mind free to float to other memories the smell of fresh-baked bread might evoke.
So go ahead and get a pen and paper, then select a scent. Here’s a list of suggestions:
Vanilla
Bacon
Fire or smoke
Cinnamon
Fresh-cut grass
Wet wool sweater
Pumpkin pie
Coffee
Popcorn burned in the microwave
Mosquito repellent
Spend five or ten minutes creating your list of associations and memories.
So where did all these words, images and ideas come from? How does your brain do that? How can one smell evoke so many memories?
Experience Creates Connections
Smell is so provocative because the neurons for smell (and taste) run directly into the hippocampus, which is the center of long-term memory. Other senses are first intercepted and interpreted by the thalamus before being relayed to the hippocampus, which is why they are less powerful in evoking old memories.6
But any of the senses or a random thought can invoke memories because all the neurons in your brain are connected. Some connections are close and nearly instantaneous, like neural superhighways; others follow a more convoluted neural pathway and take longer to complete. And some connections are yet to be formed.
Experience changes the neural connections in your brain. These changes are not just limited to creating and storing new memories. In response to your life experiences, your brain has created and re-created, wired and rewired connections and neural pathways. So even though your brain is basically the same structure as other human brains, it is as individual as your fingerprints.
Your brain isn’t a passive receptacle; it’s not a soft-tissue equivalent of a bunch of filing cabinets that you just dump new information into when you experience or learn something new. Your brain rewires itself every time you experience something new. To be equivalent, a filing cabinet would have to spontaneously grow new drawers and reorganize the papers inside those drawers every time you added a file.
Right now, you may not have a writing ritual to comfort you, boost your confidence and keep you in motion. But you can change that. With several weeks of repetition, you can create a writing ritual out of just about any smell, taste, sound, sight, texture, movement or behavior by creating new neural connections. In other words, you can change your brain to make it more “writing friendly.”
You could create a neural connection between wearing a lucky writer’s cap and writing, the taste of lemon drops and writing, the smell of stinky socks and writing, or, if you’re Friedrich Schiller, the smell of rotten apples and writing.
Let’s assume you prefer lemon drops to getting hat hair or the smell of stinky socks and rotten apples. If you were to eat a lemon drop every time you wrote for several weeks, your brain would create new connections between those two groups of neurons. According to Hebb’s Law, the neurons for eating lemon drops would wire up with the neurons for writing. The smell or taste of lemon would not only trigger your “lemon drop neurons” to fire, it would also trigger your “writing neurons” to fire.
The more often we associate a ritual with writing, and the more exclusively we associate the ritual only with writing, the more effectively the presence of the ritual triggers the “writing neurons” to fire.
INSIDE THE WRITER’S BRAIN: RITUALS BY ANY OTHER NAME
It’s certainly true that ritualized routines comfort us. The familiar is soothing. No one has done research on this specifically, but I strongly suspect that the familiarity of a writing ritual relaxes us enough to keep the cortex in control or to cause the RAS to flip control from the limbic system to the cortex.
Even if the ritual isn’t enough to keep the amygdala and the rest of the limbic system from acting up when you start writing, you can still follow the ritual into your writing. Remember, when the limbic system is in control, your actions follow the instinctual fight-or-flight response and what you’ve learned in repeated training. As you repeat a ritual, you’re training yourself to take that action automatically. Repeated neural patterns become easier to trigger without conscious thought—remember Pavlov’s dogs.
Like a pilot trained to respond to emergencies, we can train ourselves to keep writing. Behaviors that are this ingrained are considered automatic processes, which can be used by both the cortex and the limbic system.
CHALLENGE: PICK A RITUAL, ANY RITUAL AT A
LL
Identify the rituals and routines in your life. For example, do you brush your teeth every morning? I put my glasses on only after I’ve taken my morning vitamins and allergy pill, so I know that if I have my glasses on, I’ve taken my pills that day. And while writing this book, I always started my writing with a whiff of vanilla extract.
Identify any rituals, routines or almost-routines you have in your writing life. Do you always check your email before you write? (This may not be the best routine, and you might want to transfer the association to start writing with another activity that won’t distract you as much or as long.) Do you often have a cup of latte or tea when you write? What behaviors have you learned to associate with writing? If you don’t have a writing ritual or routine, develop one. If you do, consider how you could tweak those routines to make it easier to start writing.
Recall that smell signals, unlike other sensory experiences, do not have to pass through the thalamus before going directly to the hippocampus or other higher areas of the brain. Because smell has direct access to the amygdala, it is a powerful trigger for emotions, which in turn affect motivation.7 Adding a scent component to your writing ritual makes brain sense.
Stop in the Middle Of
Supposedly, Hemingway stopped his daily writing in the middle of a sentence so he’d know where to start the next day. Hemingway’s ritual of stopping in the middle was an ending ritual that led him straight into the next day’s opening ritual. He advised, “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day . . . you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time.”